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The blood of Abel and the branches of sin: Genesis A, Maxims I and Aldhelm's Carmen de uirginitate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Charles D. Wright
Charles D. Wright
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign
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Extract

The Old English Genesis A, in a moralizing expansion of the biblical narrative, describes how sin sprouted and spread in evil branches from the blood of the murdered Abel:

Critical discussion of this passage has reflected a basic disagreement about the presence of allegory in the poem. Bernard F. Huppé finds three levels of meaning in the passage:

Literally, the descendants of Cain, born after his sins, are a progeny of affliction, because they perished in the Flood. Symbolically, they are children of affliction because they dwell in the City of Babylon, of which Cain is the spiritual founder. In its moral significance Cain's sin represents the earthly beginning of all mortal, Babylonian sin …

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 25 , December 1996 , pp. 7 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 All quotations of Old English poetry are from ASPR, by line numbers; translations are my own, unless otherwise noted: ‘Then he committed that rash deed with his hands, slew his kinsman, his brother, and shed his blood, Cain that of Abel. The earth swallowed the gore of slaughter, the blood of that man. After the deadly blow malice was raised up, the fruit of miseries. From that stem afterwards grew wicked and savage fruit, the longer the more vigorously. Branches of crime spread widely through the nations, the twigs of sorrow struck the sons of men hard and sorely (as they still do), from which broad leaves of every kind of wickedness began to sprout’.

2 Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine's Influence on Old English Poetry (New York, 1959), p. 158.Google Scholar

3 The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1972), p. 33.Google Scholar

4 ‘“Heroic” and “Christian” in Genesis A: the Evidence of the Cain and Abel Episode’, Mod. Lang. Quarterly 35 (1974), 115–28, at 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Ibid. p.127.

6 Ibid. p. 117.

7 ‘Doctrine and Criticism: a Reevaluation of “Genesis A”’, NW 83 (1982), 230–8, at 232. Both Brockman and Boyd also dispute Huppé's reading of Cain's sin as a recapitulation of the Fall of Man, pointing out that the poet omits from his paraphrase the crucial verses Genesis IV.6–7, upon which Augustine based his interpretation.Google Scholar

8 Frank, Roberta, ‘Some Uses of Paranomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse’, Speculum 47 (1972), 207–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that the poet ‘highlighted potentially Christological episodes … with multiple plays on “word”, as if striving to make the Old English word more like the logos in which all meanings were enclosed’; but she also states that ‘There is no doubt that the main concern of the Genesis poet was to narrate the historical truth of Old Testament events’ (p. 215). Doane, Even (Genesis A: a New Edition (Madison, WI, 1978), p. 53)Google Scholar concedes that ‘the specific approach of Genesis A is predominantly literal’. Hill, T. D., ‘The “Variegated Obit” as an Historiographic Motif in Old English Poetry and Anglo-Latin Historical Literature’, Traditio 44 (1988), 101–24, at 101CrossRefGoogle Scholar, states similarly that ‘The Old English Genesis A is before all else a historical poem’. The poet's historiographic approach could have been modelled on the genre of the universal chronicle, which typically surveys biblical history beginning with Creation. In lines 112–13, the poet's use of the term her to signal the beginning of world history is reminiscent of the stereotyped her convention of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: ‘Her ærest gesceop ece Drihten, / helm eallwihta, heofon and eorðan’. For a stylistic feature which the poem shares with Anglo-Latin historiography, see Hill, ibid.

9 ‘“Heroic” and “Christian”’, p. 121.Google Scholar

10 Cited by Williams, D., Cain and Beowulf: a Study in Secular Allegory (Toronto, 1982), p. 104, n. 18.Google Scholar

11 The evidence for knowledge of the Hamartigenia in Anglo-Saxon England is gathered in Gernot Wieland's entry on Prudentius in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: a Trial Version, ed. Biggs, F., Hill, T. D., and Szarmach, P. E. (Binghamton, NY, 1990), p. 153.Google Scholar

12 Ed. Cunningham, M. P., CCSL 126 (Turnhout, 1966), 116–48.Google Scholar

13 Cain and Beowulf, pp. 24 and 36.Google Scholar In the Gesta Karoli Magni, ed. Pertz, G. H., MGH, Scriptores 2 (Hannover, 1879), 755, Notker of St Gallen compares Pepin the Hunchback and his co-conspirators to the giants begotten by the sons of Seth and daughters of Cain.Google Scholar

14 The apocryphal background of this tradition has been traced in detail by Mellinkoff, R., ‘Cain's Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf. Part I, Noachic Tradition’, ASE 8 (1979), 143–62Google Scholar, and ‘Cain's Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf. Part II, Post-Diluvian Survival,’ ASE 9 (1980), 183–97.Google Scholar See also Cross, J. E., ‘Towards the Identification of Old English Literary Ideas–Old Workings and New Seams’, in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture, ed. Szarmach, P. E. (Binghamton, NY, 1986), pp. 77–101, at 82–3Google Scholar, who draws attention to material on the monstrous descendants of Cain in the Hiberno-Latin biblical commentary known as the ‘Reference Bible’ (Cross prints the relevant extracts on pp. 92–100).

15 De ciuitate Dei XV.5, cited by Osborn, , ‘The Great Feud: Scriptural History and Strife in Beowulf’, PMLA 93 (1978), 973–81, at 979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Peter Brown has noted that in the Contra Faustum Manichaeum, Augustine focuses on the ‘symbolic outline’ of the event, but that in De ciuitate Dei he ‘draw[s] from it patterns of archetypal motives that sway real men, in all ages and in all countries: it is like coming from the unearthly, symbolic figures of Type and Antitype that face each other in the stained glass windows along the walls of Gothic cathedrals, to the charged humanity of a religious painting by Rembrandt…’ (Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, CA, 1967), p. 321Google Scholar; cited by Quinones, R. J., The Changes of Cain: Viόlence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1991), p. 36).Google Scholar

17 See Bloomfield, M. W., The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing, MI, 1952), pp. 70 and 73Google Scholar; Regan, C. A., ‘Patristic Psychology in the Old English “Vainglory”’, Traditio 26 (1970), 324–35, at 330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 See Katzenellenbogen, A., Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art, trans. Crick, A. (New York, 1964), pp. 63–8.Google Scholar

19 Ed. Klaeber, F., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. with First and Second Supplements (Boston, MA, 1950).Google Scholar See also Klaeber's, ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’ Anglia 35 (1911), 111–36, at 136Google Scholar; Abbetmeyer, C., Old English Poetical Motives Derived from the Doctrine of Sin (New York, 1903), p. 36.Google Scholar

20 For references, see Erffa, H. M. von, Ikonologie der Genesis: Die christlichen Bildthemen aus dem Alten Testament and ihre Quellen (Munich, 1989), pp. 376–7.Google Scholar

21 Thus Gregory the Great interpreted the vineyard of Matt. XX.1–16 as ‘the universal Church, which has brought forth many saints as so many branches, from righteous Abel up to the last of the elect who will be born at the end of the world” (Homilia XIX in euangelia, PL 76, 1154Google Scholar; trans. Hurst, D., Gregory the Great: Forty Gospel Homilies (Kalamazoo, MI, 1990), p. 78).Google Scholar Ælfric translated this passage in his homily for Septuagesima (II.v), in Ælfric's Catholic Homilies: the Second Series, ed. Godden, M., EETS ss 5 (London, 1979), 43Google Scholar: ‘þes wingeard sprytte godes gecorenan fram ðam rihtwisan abel. Oð ðam endenextan halgan. ðe on ende þyssere worulde acenned bið. swilce he swa fela winboga getyddrode…’ For Abel as protomartyr, see Hennig, J., ‘Abel's Place in the Liturgy’, Theol. Stud. 7 (1946), 126–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Cf. Biggs, F. M., ‘The Passion of Andreas’, SP 85 (1988), 413–27.Google Scholar

23 The legends of the Jews, 6 vols. (Philadelphia, 1909–1938) I, 110–11Google Scholar; V, 140. See also the article ‘Abel’ in The Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 vols. (New York, 1901–1906) I, 48.Google Scholar Rabelais travestied such pious folklore in his Pantagruel: ‘the earth soaked with that righteous blood became so prodigiously fertile in all the fruits the soil offers us (and especially the medlar apple) that everyone ever after has always called it the year of the giant medlar apples, because it took just three of them to make a bushel’ (Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Raffel, B. (New York, 1990), p. 135Google Scholar). Giants and other monstrosities are engendered after people eat these fruit! Another medieval legend found in the Queste del Saint Graal and Malory's Morte Darthur (XVII.5–6) relates how ‘the offshoot from the tree of knowledge changed from white to green to red when Abel (a ‘type’ of Christ) was born and from green to red when he was slain’ (see Ladner, G., ‘Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance’, in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Envin Panofsky, ed. Meiss, M. (New York, 1961), pp. 303–22, at 310, n. 35).Google Scholar Possibly related to this Tree-of-Life variant of the tradition is the great sycamore tree ‘planted in the time of Abel’ in the continuation of Chrétien de Troyes's Le chevalierde la charrette, ed. Roques, M., Classiques français du moyen âge 86 (Paris, 1958), lines 6983–90.Google Scholar

24 The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus, ed. Cross, J. E. and Hill, T. D. (Toronto, 1982), pp. 101–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Schapiro, M., ‘Cain's Jawbone that Did the First Murder’, The Art Bull. 24 (1942), 205–12Google Scholar, repr. in his Late Antique, Early Christian and Mediaeval Art: Selected Papers (New York, 1979), pp. 249–65.Google Scholar Schapiro points out (p. 253) that this legend is represented in the Junius Manuscript illustration (p. 49), where Abel's blood strikes a rock (for a facsimile, see Ohlgren, T.. Anglo-Saxon Textual Illumination (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992), p. 550, pl. 16.25Google Scholar). According to the Midrash Rabbah on Genesis IV.9, Abel's blood ‘could not ascend above, because the soul had not yet ascended thither; nor could it go below, because no man had yet been buried there; hence the blood lay spattered on the trees and the stones’ (Midrash Rabbah, trans. Freedman, H. and Simon, M., 10 vols. (London, 1939) I, 189). I thank Thomas N. Hall for drawing my attention to this passage.Google Scholar

25 In the Middle Irish Saltair na Rann, Cain dies when a ‘bent tree’ in the valley of Jehosaphat strikes against the lump in his forehead (one of the ‘marks’ of Cain); thereafter, the poet says, the valley was ‘without fruits or fertility’. See The Irish Adam and Eve Story from Saltair na Rann, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1976) 1Google Scholar: Greene, D. and Kelly, F., Text and Translation, lines 2001–8 (p. 93).Google Scholar In his commentary on the passage (The Irish Adam and Eve Story II: Commentary, 136Google Scholar), Brian Murdoch suggests that the barrenness may be associated with the tradition of the barrenness of the earth after the slaying of Abel. I am grateful to Edward Mathews for drawing my attention to this passage. According to the Prose Solomon and Saturn Pater Noster Dialogue, the moon was many times brighter prior to the death of Abel (The Metrical Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, ed. Menner, R. (New York, 1942), p. 169Google Scholar). On this motif, see Wright, C. D., The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature, CSASE 6 (Cambridge, 1993), 250, n. 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 The Prose Solomon and Saturn, ed. Cross, and Hill, , pp. 111–12.Google Scholar Cross and Hill cite the Old Latin variant from Jerome's commentary on Ezekiel (PL 25, 257). That the Genesis A poet used a mixed text of the Bible with many Old Latin readings has been demonstrated by Remley, P., ‘The Latin Textual Basis of Genesis A’, ASE 17 (1988), 163–90.Google Scholar Abel's blood is invoked in maledictions, including Christ's curse upon the Pharisees (Matt. XXIII.35); for other examples, see Robert Gordis's article ‘Cain and Abel’, The Universal jewish Encyclopedia II, 626.Google Scholar

27 See Ginzberg, , The Legends of the Jews I, 112Google Scholar; Dähnhardt, O., Natursagen, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1907–1912) IGoogle Scholar: Sagen zum Alten Testament, 248–9.Google Scholar A Hiberno-Latin or Irish-influenced commentary entitled Commemoratio Geneseos refers to a curious traditio malorum that the fire of Judgement will burn just as much of the surface of the earth as Abel's blood flowed over (Paris, BN, lat. 10457, 69v–70r; on the commentary, see my ‘Hiberno-Latin and Irish-Influenced Biblical Commentaries, Florilegia, and Homily Collections’, in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, ed. Biggs, et at., p. 95).Google Scholar

28 Acts of Thomas III. 31, in New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Hennecke, E. and Schneemelcher, W., trans. Wilson, R. McL., 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1965) II, 460 (I owe the reference to Timothy Jones).Google Scholar

29 Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1982), p. 350.Google Scholar The edition and translation by Mackie, W. S. construes the passage similarly: ‘There has been feud among mankind ever since the earth drank the blood of Abel. That was no mere hate of a day from which arose far and wide among men, among many nations, drops of blood due to strife, great crime, hatred blended with harm’ (The Exeter Book, Part II: Poems IX–XXXII, EETS 194 (London, 1934), 45–7).Google Scholar

30 Berkhout, C., ‘A Critical Edition of the Old English Gnomic Poems’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. of Notre Dame, 1975)Google Scholar, glossary, s.v. ‘wrohtdropa’. Kirk, J. M., ‘A Critical Edition of the Old English Gnomic Poems in the Exeter Book and MS Cotton Tiberius B. I’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Brown Univ., 1970; privately ptd, 1978), takes wrohtdropan as dative singular (glossary, p. 181). I am grateful to Carl Berkhout for allowing me to consult his copy of Kirk's edition.Google Scholar

31 Poems of Wisdom and learning in Old English (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 73–5.Google Scholar

32 ‘Four Difficult Passages in the Exeter Book Maxims’, ELN 18 (1981) 247–51, at 250.Google Scholar

33 Poems of Wisdom and Learning, p. 75.Google Scholar

34 In Maxims 1 there may also be an allusion to the giants descended from Cain, as Patrizia Lendinara has suggested, especially if one emends aþolwarum to atole waran (‘Un'allusione ai Giganti: versi gnomici exoniensi 192–200’, AIUON 16 (1973), 85–98).Google Scholar

35 The same conception appears in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal, ed. Lachmann, K. (Berlin, 1926), 466, lines 21–2 (‘dô huop sich erst der menschen nit: / also wert er immer sit’).Google Scholar See Mohr, W., ‘Parzifals ritterliche Schuld’, Wirkendes Wort 2 (1951–1952), 148–60, at 153Google Scholar, who compares the Middle High German Genesis, ed. Dollmayr, V., Die altdeutschen Genesis nach der Wiener Handschrift, Altdeutsche Textbibliothek 31 (Halle, 1932), lines 1254–7 (‘da sluoch Kain / Abel den bruoder sin. / da huop sich der nit, / der richsinot iemer sit’).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 ‘A quo pestiferum glescebat semen in orbe, / Unde seges spissa spurcis succrevit aristis’ (Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, R., MGH, Auct. antiq. 15 (Berlin, 1919), 455Google Scholar, lines 2499–500; trans. Rosier, J. in Lapidge, M. and Rosier, J., Aldhelm: the Poetic Works (Cambridge, 1985), p. 158).Google Scholar

37 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, , p. 463, lines 2710–16Google Scholar: ‘From that root is born a black and leafy bush and a shady grove arises from the ominous seed: at first there is contempt of (one's) elders who teach (the) precepts, while the pride of mind swells in a conceited breast; then the menace of envious hatred arises, which with swelling arrogance is wont to despise those who are equals and, by rejecting its attendants, to reign proud’ (trans. Rosier, in Aldhelm: the Poetic Works, p. 163Google Scholar). Hermann, J. P., ‘Some Varieties of Psychomachia in Old English II: the Middle Ages’, Amer. Benedictine Rev. 34 (1983), 188–222, at 201, traces Aldhelm's use of the figure of the tree of vices to Cassian's Conlationes.Google Scholar

38 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, , p. 463Google Scholar, lines 2721–9 (emphasis mine): ‘Thus, corrupted by the immense putrefaction of malice, one brother broke off the splendid covenant with his brother, who had been the first to burn the fatty inwards of a lamb, while God despised the votive offerings of cruel Cain [Gen. IV.3–16]. Thence an evil harvest of rough brambles grew up thickly, when the recreant sprinkled the fields with purple blood. Thence the mutterings of proud voices are born, as well as the sin of the heart which refuses to obey commands, and also the savage slander of the tongue which lacerates men’ (trans. Rosier, in Aldhelm: the Poetic Works, p. 163).Google Scholar

39 Aldhelm must have known a Latin version of the Acts of Thomas, since he quotes from it a part of Thomas's speech in praise of virginity (see Wright, , The Irish Tradition, p. 246, n. 123Google Scholar), but the surviving Latin version does not include the passage on the thorns. For a comparison of the contents of the Latin and Greek versions, see Zelzer, K., Die alten lateinischen Thomasakten, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 122 (Berlin, 1977), xiv–xv.Google Scholar

40 There is an echo of the Hamartigenia in Aldhelm's Carmen, line 2740 (see Ehwald's apparatus, ad loc).

41 In his companion prose De uirginitate, Aldhelm had invoked the typological connection between the blood of Abel and the blood of Christ, but evidently he was undisturbed by (or unconscious of) the incongruity.

42 In a footnote to his study of the Cain and Abel episode in Genesis A, Brockman refers to this passage, along with several others, as an example of Christian interpretation of the diabolical envy of Cain, in connection with the description of Cain's anger in lines 976–9 (‘“Heroic and Christian”’, p. 120, n. 14Google Scholar). Brockman does not quote the Aldhelm passage or point out its relevance to the image of the branches of sin in the moralizing passage of Genesis A and inMaxims J.

43 No such tradition is mentioned by Aptowitzer, V., Kain and Abel in der Agada, den Apokryphen, der hellenistischen, christlichen und muhammedanischen Literatur (Vienna and Leipzig, 1922)Google Scholar; by von Erffa, Ikonologie der Genesis; or by Ulrich, A., Kain und Abel in der Kunst: Untenuchungen zur Ikonographie und Auslegungsgeschichte (Bamberg, 1981).Google Scholar

44 See Lapidge, and Rosier, , Aldhelm: the Poetic Works, pp. 1–4.Google Scholar Alcuin listed Aldhelm among the authors available at the library at York. Only during the ninth century, when Latin learning in Anglo-Saxon England had reached its lowest ebb, did manuscripts of Aldhelm's works become scarce, so that in the tenth century copies had to be imported from the Continent (ibid. p. 2). From the tenth and eleventh centuries, we have several glossed manuscripts of the Carmen de uirginitate; see Kiff-Hooper, J. A., ‘Class Books or Works of Art? Some Observations on the Tenth-Century Manuscripts of Aldhelm's De Laude Virginitatis’, in Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays presented to John Taylor, ed. Wood, I. and Loud, G. A. (London, 1991), pp. 15–26.Google Scholar

45 Aldhelm: the Poetic Works, p. 3.Google Scholar

46 Gesta Pontificum, ed. Hamilton, N. E. S. A., RS (London, 1870), p. 336.Google Scholar William claims King Alfred's lost Handboc as his source. See Lapidge, M., ‘Aldhelm's Latin Poetry and Old English Verse’, Comparative Lit. 31 (1979), 209–31, at 228–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 See Lapidge, and Rosier, , Aldhelm: the Poetic Works, pp. 12–14.Google Scholar

48 See Krapp, ASPR 1, xxvii.Google ScholarDoane, Genesis A, pp. 36–7Google Scholar, tentatively sets the terminus a quo for the composition of the poem as early as c. 650, but favours an eighth-century date. Fulk, R. D., A History of Old English Meter (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 392, finds the traditional relatively early dating sound.Google Scholar

49 On the onomastic allusion in the poet's term sædberendes Sethes lice (line 1145), see Robinson, F. C., ‘The Significance of Names in Old English Literature’, Anglia 86 (1968), 14–58, at 29–30.Google Scholar

50 Genesis A, p. 253.Google Scholar

51 See Dawson, R. MacGregor, ‘The Structure of the Old English Gnomic Poems’, JEGP 61 (1962), 14–22Google Scholar, and Frank, , ‘Paranomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse’, p. 224.Google Scholar

52 See Raw, B., ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius 11 from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’, ASE 5 (1976), 133–48.Google Scholar

53 See above, p. 11 and n. 24.

54 See pl. I; see also Dodwell, C. R. and Clemoes, P., The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch (British Museum Cotton Claudius B.iv), EEMF 18 (Copenhagen, 1974). The illustration occurs on 8v.Google Scholar

55 For examples, see Ulrich, Kain and Abel, figs. 45, 53, 79, 119, 120, 219, 229 and 290. In Ulrich's figs. 45 (fresco, Venice, San Marco, first half of the thirteenth century), 119 (the bronze doors at San Zeno, Verona, c. 1099) and 290 (fresco, Capua, Sant Angelo in Formis, mid-eleventh century), the position of the tree relative to Abel's body is very similar to that in the OE Hexateuch. For other representations which include a tree, see Mellinkoff, R., ‘Cain and the jews’, Jnl of Jewish Art 6 (1979), 16–38, p. 19, fig. 1; p. 29, fig. 18; p. 30, fig. 20; p. 31, fig. 22; p. 34, fig. 26; p. 35, fig. 27Google Scholar). In some of these the tree near Abel's body is almost certainly decorative, since other trees occur elsewhere within the same picture frame. According to the distinctive version of the Holy Cross legend represented by La Queste del Saint Graal, Abel was slain beneath a tree grown from a branch of the Tree of Knowledge, which turned red ‘in remembrance of the blood that had been shed there’. See La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. Pauphilet, A., Classiques français du moyen âge 33 (Paris, 1923), 219Google Scholar: ‘Et de cel Arbre avint une grant merveille, car si tost come Abel ot mort receue soz l'arbre, perdi il la color vert et devint en totes choses vermeux; et ce fu en remembrance dou sane qui i avoit esté espanduz’. But this motif apparently does not occur in any other version of the Holy Cross legend. See Quinn, E. C., ‘The Quest of Seth, Solomon's Ship and the Grail’, Traditio 21 (1965), 185–222, at 193 and n. 33Google Scholar, and The Penitence of Adam: a Study of the Andrius MS (University, MO, 1980), p. 52 and n. 78.Google Scholar

56 The representations in Ulrich, Kain und Abel, include only one (fig. 130) which depicts the streams of blood, but here there is no tree. The ultimate model for the illustration in the OE Hexateuch need not, however, have been a Cain-and-Abel scene. Henderson, George, ‘Cain's Jawbone’, Jnl of the Warburg and Courtauld Inst. 24 (1961), 108–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that the artist's model was an illustration of Samson slaying the Philistines (hence the jawbone). One of the unusual elements of the composition, Cain's grasping of Abel's arm with his left hand (see Henderson, , p. 112 and n. 26Google Scholar), is exactly paralleled in a drawing of David beheading Goliath in London, BL, Cotton Tiberius C. vi, 8v (reproduced by Temple, E., Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts 900–600 (London, 1976), pl. 307Google Scholar). Cain's position is typical of iconographic representations of the defeated warrior in antique tradition, a form adapted to depictions of martyrs in Byzantine iconography (see Ulrich, , Kain and Abel, p. 58).Google Scholar

57 Clemoes, and Dodwell, , Illustrated Hexateuch, p. 65, refer to the artist's ‘interest in extra-biblical material’ in the earlier illustrations.Google Scholar

58 Henderson (‘Cain's Jawbone’) and Barb, A. A. (‘Cain's Murder Weapon and Samson's Jawbone of an Ass’, Jnl of the Warburg and Courtauld Inst. 35 (1972), 386–9)CrossRefGoogle Scholar rightly dismiss Schapiro's explanation of the origin of the motif as arising from a confusion of Old English Cain bana and cinban, but the earliest examples of the motif are from England and Ireland. Henderson argues that its occurrence in the Irish Lebor Gabála is due to English influence. More recendy, A. Breeze has argued that the English owed the motif to the Irish (‘Cain's Jawbone, Ireland, and the Prose Solomon and Saturn’, N&Q 231 (1992), 433–6).Google Scholar On Cain's murder weapon, see also Erffa, von, Ikonologie der Genesis, pp. 370–1.Google Scholar

59 See now Orchard, A., The Poetic Art of Aldhelm, CSASE 8 (Cambridge, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 Both the Exeter Book Riddle 35 (The Exeter Book, ed. Krapp, and Dobbie, , ASPR 3, 198Google Scholar) and The Leiden Riddle (The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Dobbie, , ASPR 6, 109Google Scholar) are translated from Aldhelm's Enigma no. xxxiii, ‘Lorica’. Exeter Riddle 40 is translated from Aldhelm's Enigma no. c, ‘Creatura’ (see O'keeffe, K. O'brien, ‘The Text of Aldhelm's Enigma no. c in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 697 and Exeter Riddle 40’ ASE 14 (1985), 61–73).Google Scholar

61 The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Dobbie, , ASPR 6, 97.Google Scholar See Lapidge, M., ‘The Hermeneutic Style in Tenth-Century Anglo-Latin Verse’, ASE 4 (1975), 67–111, at 83.Google Scholar

62 Smith, A. H., Three Northumbrian Poems (London, 1933), p. 18Google Scholar, thinks it possible that Aldhelm himself was the translator of the ‘Lorica’ riddle. Lapidge, and Rosiet, , Aldhelm: the Poetic Works, p.18Google Scholar, state that ‘there have been no successful attempts to discover [Aldhelm's Old English verse] among the body of surviving Old English poetry’. Aldhelm's description of the battle of the vices and virtues in the concluding section of the Carmen de uirginitate probably influenced the development of psychomachia allegory in Old English poetry. See Irvine, M., ‘Cynewulf's Use of Psychomachia Allegory: the Latin Sources of Some “Interpolated” Passages’, in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Bloomfield, M. W. (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp. 39–62Google Scholar; Hermann, J. P., Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry (Ann Arbor, MI, 1989), pp. 20–8. I wish to thank Peter Baker, David Howlett, Martin Irvine and Nancy Stork for responding on ANSAX-L to my query concerning AJdhelm's works as a source for Old English literature.Google Scholar

63 An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at Stony Brook, NY, whose theme was ‘The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo-Saxon Culture’. I wish to thank Thomas N. Hall of the University of Illinois at Chicago for his valuable comments and suggestions.